In previous years it took me less than 10 minutes to vote, and that is including voting for soil & water conservation district supervisor. (I live in a city of ~5,000 people). This year it is in a hockey arena (instead of the elementary school gym in previous years)
I will set my stopwatch and time it this year.
Brian
At my place here in Hoosierville they told a voter she was not allowed to use her phone.
I was thinking they should open up express lines - a la supermarkets - for voters who actually had considered the candidates/issues they were going to vote on before being handed a ballot.
But then I realized there is such a line - early voting.
My polling place took 30 minutes for L-Z during morning rush, with no wait for A-K. They said the delay had been shifting back and forth.
Moderator Note
pseudotriton ruber ruber, political jabs, even by innuendo, are not permitted in General Questions. Do not do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
7am to 7pm here.
In many states you can use cel phones while on the “outer” line but not once you are actually inside the designated voting area.
Yeah - that might be it. Tho all lines were inside one room, they told her she could step to the other side of the open double doors and use it.
For those of you seeing lines on the news already, what you are most likely seeing is people lining up before the polls open. One of my co-workers said that there were almost 100 people in line, 10 minutes before the doors opened. Another said she saw something similar.
I voted 90 minutes after the polls opened, submitted ballot number 301 for the day, and it took me under 10 minutes from the time I left my car to the time I got back to it. There was a steady trickle of people voting at that time, but the only line was for people registering to vote, not those already registered in my precinct.
I drove by a couple of polling places that had lines around the block about an hour and a half after opening time.
OP you are just seeing one of the aspects of living in a crowded urban area. More people = lines. There are 50,000 people in the entire county I live in, two small towns, no cities. I walked right into the elementary school gym and directly to the check-in desk. Then I waited for one person that was voting before me. In and out in 2 minutes. During the non-presidential elections I’ve been the only one there voting. Even this morning there were more poll workers than voters.
The OP seems to be asserting the contrasting evidence that crowded urban areas in Germany don’t have long waits to vote.
I waited in line today for almost two hours to vote in DC. The ballot itself wasn’t that complicated, but the lines were long. There was a line to sign in, and two lines, one for electronic voting and one for paper ballots. I voted paper as there was one electronic poll and about six places to complete your ballot. We had elections for ANC, City Council, Chairman of the City Council, Shadow Senator, Delegate to Congress, Shadow Representative, two initiatives, and another seat, the purpose of which I cannot recall.
As a comparison, the lines on non-presidential elections are much shorter. I’ve rarely waited more than 15 minutes if that long.
At least not on a significant scale. I’d say that people would really start complaining if they had to wait > 10 minutes.
My mother was a poll worker when I was growing up so I’ve been watching the process for 50 years. Here in Upstate New York the only thing that has changed in all that time is the level of technology.
Back in the 1950s, polling places were set up in permanent shacks on small vacant lots owned by the city. They were used only for primaries and election days. Heat came from a stove which never worked well, though I don’t remember whether it was coal or wood. There were four poll workers, two from each party. (Third parties were essentially non-existent at the time.) Mechanical lever machines were used. At the end of the long voting day (6am-9pm) they read the totals off the machine and gave them to a poll watcher who took the totals to the city or county.
The technology today is machine-readable fill-in dots, the polling places are in public buildings, but the process is almost identical in every other way. It’s one of the most old-fashioned legacy systems extant in the U.S.
My experience tells me that most of the oddities that people from other countries see about our voting stem from our incredibly complex ballots. Although there are some local and state exceptions, the overwhelming number of all elections decided every year take place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
This year, there will be the Presidency, a Senate race, a House race. There will be county races, city races, and judgeships. There will be state races, special district races, and school district races. There will be propositions or initiatives or constitutional amendments. Ballots may have 20, 30, or who knows who many different positions to vote on. Each office may have 6, 8, 12 parties contesting them. Here in New York State we have what might be the unique system of allowing candidates to be nominated by several parties, so you can roam all over the ballot and pick the same name from half a dozen different lines. There is no option to vote for all the candidates of one party as there is in some states. There all takes many times longer than just walking in and choosing a president. It’s like reading a multi-page menu at a Chinese restaurants, where there are hundreds of dishes with tiny variations. I’m sure than most people have never seen what their actual ballot looks like before they get to the polling place. It’s often confusing and overwhelming. It’s worst in places with very high densities of population, because you can’t cut the precinct size down sufficiently, and places with populations who are less capable of dealing with the confusion.
The other side, tabulating the votes, is almost as bad. Almost every one of those offices I mentioned above have unique boundaries. The President and Senator are state wide, but the House has its own weirdly-shaped district in most states. The state legislature has its own districts. The city and county are divided into a multitude of overlapping districts. School systems in a county don’t necessarily coincide with any other particular political boundary. Judges may be city or county or multi-county. Votes have to be built up from the bottom. Each polling place is known as a precinct (confusingly, several precincts may vote at the same site, a school, e.g., so two tables at a single site may be different precincts and have different ballots and different totals). The central vote counters have to figure out which of the hundreds or thousands of precincts go to which of the dozens of races just to get county-wide figures which can be fed to the state. State counters have to figure out which of the thousands or tens of thousands of precincts get totaled to produce numbers for the races that cut across county lines.
And of course, the boundary lines of almost everything change every decade with reapportionment (and in other ways for local redistricting) so what you do one year may have no bearing on what you add together the next.
This is all guaranteed by our hyper-local system of putting as many positions as close to the voters as possible along with our seemingly random clumping and dividing of areas into voting districts. It can’t be changed without changing everything from the bottom up to rationalize it. And that will never happen.
It it irrational? Yes and no. It’s certainly inefficient. It certainly leads to mistakes happening. Whenever you read about how some precinct’s votes were overlooked or lost or misapplied or left in somebody’s car trunk, it screams imbecility. But it’s the inevitable product of a horribly complicated system.
But I’ve never waited more than 10 minutes.
The cure for this is to do like Oregon, and do away with polling places altogether. Some states also allow you to request “permanent vote by mail” status, although they still have polling places. I went to that years ago, although I don’t actually mail my ballot. I dropped it off at City Hall last Thursday. In addition to removing hassle, getting rid of polling places saves the state a bit of money.
ETA:
If one can work out the access / security issues satisfactorily, the next step, of course, is to simply allow voting online. Then you don’t have fill out the stupid paper ballot, and the state saves some more by not having to send out voting materials.
When I voted at 10:30 a.m. I was #571, which works out to more than 125 voters per hour. I work pretty fast, but it took me around 10 minutes, so even with 10 machines in my polling place, the line is going to back up – and I vote at midday when there isn’t much of a crowd. The election workers were complaining they didn’t have enough volunteers – two election judges are supposed to supervise handing out ballots, to cross-check each other. Instead they had one judge handing out one group of ballots and another judge handing out the other group, and they were simply initialing each other’s work.
Plus, surprisingly, at the time I was signing in, there were five people waiting to sign the I-M registration book, but not a single person with a last name N-Z.
I am not outraged by this. As long as you require people to go to a common place, staffed by volunteers, to vote, you’re going to have foulups.
There was no line to vote this morning in San Diego. The CA scantron ballot is great. If you get some guy that has to read the propositions right now instead of deciding he won’t be holding up the line because the polling machine is just a cheap cardboard privacy cubical it is easy to have 15 or 20 of those to keep the lines moving. Much better than the electronic voting machine boondoggle we had a few years ago.
Don’t trust that everything you see on the news is representative of the entire country. If this poll is representative (which it may not be, it certainly isn’t random), more than half pf Dopers didn’t wait at all, and the vast majority waited less than 30 minutes:
It might have been interesting to add a “mail in / absentee” selection.
I haven’t been yet but my mother went a 9am and it took her about 20 minutes.
No ID was required, just give your name, address and birth date.
I’ll go around 2, after lunch but before work lets out.